Little Powerhouse

"Want a powerful ultra book with stand alone graphics, upgradable, quick, and not an Apple... this is your machine! This is a fast, portable machine with an excellent display. I upgraded the RAM and HD to 10GB and SSD easily. This thing's a beast! Will boot from sleep in 3s.Windows 8 takes some getting used to but it's intuitive and not as hard as I thought it would be. Great build quality - feels awesome to handle. I am happy that Costco has offered a bilingual version of this machine - makes typing in English and French a breeze. This machine is one of the most well-rounded and powerful out there."

Great hardware, shame about the OS

"A Windows 7 version of this ultrabook would get 5 stars. The hardware is great, but Windows 8 new user interface certainly is not.

It's much easier to adjust to the standard bilingual canadian keyboard with the shortened "Shift" key than then changes in Windows 8.

In addition, unlike Windows 7 version of this ultrabook where ASUS provide an app for you to burn a set of Windows recovery discs (as described in the manual,) no such app is provided for this in the Windows 8 version, making recovery from hard-drive failures challenging.

Recommended for anyone looking for a 1080p ultrabook with a little extra graphics performance and has enough technical savvy to overcome Windows 8's shortcomings."

Great Laptop!

"Amazing laptop, highly recommend!Pros: Very good build quality, great design; amazing screen (IPS not-glossy, fairly bright (although not as bright as ux31), 1920x1080 resolution you rarely find in 13'' displays); thin, yet comes with a dedicated video card; RAM is extendable to 10GB (2GB is soldered, but it has 1 memory slot. 4GB can be replaced by up to 8GB)

Cons: slow hybrid drive (5200 RPM); small SSD - should have been at least 32GB to allow installing OS there; I installed Win 7 64bit as it has absolutely no sense to use Windows 8 without a touch screen"

Unreliable

Pros: light, slick

Cons: unreliable hardware, windows 8, flexing keyboard, not as light as one would think

"Well I jumped ship from Thinkpad to Asus. I was always satisfied with Asus as a motherboard manufacturer but this is my first time trying a laptop made by Asus.In a matter of weeks, certain keys on the keyboard stopped responding. Now the power button which is also a key on the keyboard is unresponsive. Results: The laptop doesn't even turn on anymore.I don't know if I was unlucky or not but for now I will wait until Asus get their things together. For the price of the product, I expect quality on part with a Mac Air."

Warning about the key board

Pros: great design & features

Cons: fast typing is near impossible, due to shift key being out of its proper position

"Got the computer home. Loved everything about it. Then as soon as i started to type documents realized the fatal flaw of this machine. The key board is NOT as shown in the picture. The keys are not in the usual spot. The biggest problem here is the left shift key.It is not immediately next to the Z key as you would expect. There is a useless and random key that produces a back slash between the shift and the z. Normally there is simply an oversized shift key next to the Z so its easy to insert captial letters as needed.

This is a big deal for me because my work is all word based, I type very quick and this extra reach needed to hit that shift key is very problematic.

Its unfortunate that Asus decided to move a key that is a critical part of typing and has been in the same position for decades. It boggles my mind actually why any manufacturer would insert a key that gives you a backslash - which you never use in place of a shift which you use to place upper case letters in text every few strokes.

if you write a lot and type in the proper style I honestly think you should AVOID this laptop. Shame because i loved everything else about it."